


The Space

by Cadhla



Category: Darkstalkers
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-19
Updated: 2009-12-19
Packaged: 2017-10-04 16:18:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/32107
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cadhla/pseuds/Cadhla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the spaces between battles, the monsters sleep, and all the things they fight so hard to hide come creeping out into the light...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Space

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Reskel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Reskel/gifts).



_The arena lights are dim, the shadows of the Dark Realm flowing in and reclaiming that which is theirs by right. The crowds are silent; the battles are, for the moment, at a standstill. They will resume—they always resume—but for now, stillness is the victor, and darkness holds dominion over all._

*

**GHOST GIRLS, LOST AT SEA.**

*

She is a sister and she is a warrior and she is alive and she is the restless dead and she is everything and she is nothing and sometimes the sheer confusion of it all is enough to make her head hurt. She misses her sister. Now that they're here again, in the Dark Realm—and didn't they win their freedom? Didn't they free their mother, and themselves, and win the right to live?—Mei-Ling is a ghost even to her. The ghost of a ghost. She is the palace that Mei-Ling haunts, and it burns in her like fire, the knowledge that she can't hold her sister's hand, can't tell her that everything's going to be all right. Mei-Ling knows all her secrets now, because palace ghosts always do, and she can't tell her pretty lies; Hsien-Ko knows everything's never going to be all right again, and so does Mei-Ling.

This has to end. This has to end. _This has to end._ But they have been here before, they have fought these battles before, and each day she comes a little closer to sure that this is the war that has no end; this is Hell. Their brief times together, in the sunshine, among the living, exist purely to be sure they never forget that cold and bitter fact.

This is Hell. Hsien-Ko wraps her arms around herself and listens to the distant, dying sound of her sister's soul, singing alone in the interior darkness that threatens to consume them both, again, forever.

*

**WEREWOLVES OF LONDON.**

*

Jon Talbain says he doesn't blame his father for leaving Makai, for falling in love with a human woman, for siring a child who would be unable to be either fully human or fully of the Kreutz. Jon Talbain says he doesn't blame his mother for being wooed by the affections of a kind, noble man who was gentle and savage by turns, sweeping her off her feet and making her his and his alone. Jon Talbain says a great many things.

Jon Talbain is a liar.

Here is the secret he keeps from everyone, hidden deep in his heart of hearts, that strange and savage forest where the wolves have human hands and the human girls look upon the world with eyes like wolves: He blames them all. He will never be human, for to be human would require the removal of so much of who he is that the result would be someone else entirely. A human man, and happy, perhaps, but not Jon Talbain. Jon would be gone. He will never be Kreutz, even if he could desire that fate, for the human side of his nature hates too fiercely, and fights too hard, for their peace to ever be his to claim as his own. He will never belong fully to either world, however many battles he wins, however much darkness he overcomes.

To truly overcome the darkness, to truly give himself to the light, he would need to slay the one beast he has never truly defeated—the one beast he can never live without. Alone in the space between the battles, Jon Talbain looks at the razor with its sharp and silver blades, and wonders whether Heaven can make room for one more wolf.

*

**THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT IS SWEETEST.**

*

They think she doesn't know the things they say about her, on those rare occasions when she takes her place on Makai's throne and watches the Dark Realm spinning out around her like spider webs spinning out from the widow at their heart. They think she doesn't know they call her "flighty" and "immature," they think she doesn't know they look on her with scorn. They think she doesn't mourn for her father.

They're wrong. No one mourns Belial like she does; no one ever could. No one else called him "father," ran to him when they were sad, or frightened, or alone. No one loved him like she did, and that is perhaps the greatest tragedy of all, because she's broken inside, she knows she's broken, and so her love was like a vase that's been smashed and glued back together again: It's beautiful, but it will never be water-tight. All the flowers you put in it will die, because the water will keep leaking out the cracks.

So she runs away every chance she gets, throws herself into the arena, throws herself into the dreams of mortal men, and she tries to forget that she failed him; in the end, when her father needed her the most, she wasn't there. She's broken. Something's missing.

She just doesn't know what it is.

*

**CLOAKS AS RED AS BLOOD.**

*

B.B. Hood needs more ammo and slower monsters. And while she's asking for the impossible, how about a pony?

This is the most fun she's ever had in her life, and she never wants it to end.

Bang.

*

**LITTLE GIRL LOST.**

*

Lilith Aensland likes mint chip ice cream, and puppies, and that look little kids get on their faces the first time they taste something that they really don't like very much. Lilith Aensland likes going to the movies, and eating greasy popcorn coated in artificial butter, and the smell of industrial cleaner. Lilith Aensland likes the stories bats tell each other when the sun is coming up, and all the mother bats and whispering their little baby bats to sleep.

Lilith Aensland doesn't exist. And the worst part of all is that she knows it. She's the magical equivalent of industrial waste, a spell gone horribly awry, an enchanted princess who woke to learn that she was just a story—and worse, that her pages were left on the cutting room floor. Time is short, and there's no way to explain to the _real_ princess how important it is that she find her way home before the book is closed.

Lilith Aensland likes being alive. She knows that can't last. So until it stops, she's going to do her best to make sure that her story continues...even if she won't really be alive to see it.

*

_The shadows flow and fall in the space between the battles...and there can only be one victor, after all._

_In the end, the darkness always wins._


End file.
